Enabling the rights, legal entitlements and safety of all, regardless of history

Sunday, 13 October 2013

On Enabler, Keir Starmer, Today

Sun Oct 13, 2013 1:06 pm

Why victims rights should be kept outside the courtroom

"Starmer clearly considers the rise of victims’ advocacy and its lamentable corrosion of due process in our legal system as a wholly good thing, not the disastrous subversion of the rule of law that it really is. Therapeutic jurisprudence – the belief that courts should provide some form of therapeutic “closure” for “victims” – is wholly at odds with the most fundamental tenet of the rule of law, that a defendant shall be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

By referring to complainants as victims, Starmer and the cops are showing that they have utter contempt for the presumption of innocence, which they are far more likely to see as an inconvenient obstacle in the path of punitive governance – an obstacle without which real individual liberty is rendered impossible, because by removing it, the punitive state can lock its citizens up at whim, on the say-so of an accuser.

He is still peddling the preposterous flim-flam that victims of sexual offences are intimidated by official indifference to their plight, and that the credibility test is somehow a throwback to an unenlightened era. In other words, he is recycling the cover-story so beloved of the relentlessly punitive victims' advocacy movement, whose organisations and representatives work so closely with law enforcement and share such identical illiberal and authoritarian sentiments that they are effectively a department of the police.

If you go to court after accusing someone of a sexual offence, especially one which you allege took place decades ago, you should expect to be vigorously cross-examined and have your credibility tested aggressively by any competent defence lawyer, because in the compulsory hysteria of our times, you could well be sending someone to a locked up hell-hole for many years."

"The increase in historical allegations post-Savile has very little, if
anything, to do with brave “victims” summoning up the courage to report
their abusers. Rather it has everything to do with complainants making
false allegations (for whatever reason, but money often comes into it)
safe in the belief that their stories will not be subjected to the
slightest scrutiny by the police and the prosecuting authorities. For
these complainants (and more especially their money-grubbing lawyers)
have picked up clear signals that the police and the Crown Prosecution
Service are on their side and that their allegations will be gratefully
received and unquestioningly believed."